Abstract
Test items are often evaluated and compared by contrasting the shapes of their item characteristics curves (ICC's) or surfaces. The current paper develops and applies three general (i.e., nonparametric) comparisons of the shapes of two item characteristic surfaces: (i) proportional latent odds, (ii) uniform relative difficulty, and (iii) item sensitivity. Two items may be compared in these ways while making no assumption about the shapes of item characteristic surfaces for other items, and no assumption about the dimensionality of the latent variable. Also studied is a method for comparing the relative shapes of two item characteristic curves in two examinee populations.
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The author is grateful to Paul Holland, Robert Mislevy, Tue Tjur, Rebecca Zwick, the editor and reviewers for valuable comments on the subject of this paper, to Mari A. Pearlman for advice on the pairing of items in the examples, and to Dorothy Thayer for assistance with computing.
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Rosenbaum, P.R. Comparing item characteristic curves. Psychometrika 52, 217–233 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02294236
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02294236